Venezuela: From April 11 to today’s dictatorship

09.04.05 | The third anniversary of the historical events of April 11-13, 2002, is approaching, events that can be given two different readings, depending on which side of the street you are on: the government’s or the opposition’s.
Those who agree with the government’s doctrine will enjoy a week given over to a full-blown propaganda offensive. The owners of the revolutionary process will spare no efforts (or money) to continue selling their concocted version of what happened, and there will be many who, naively, will continue to buy it. After all, propaganda is something that the Bolivarians have proved to be very good at.

In its determination to rewrite history –something that all victors do-, the government has tried to erase what truly happened from people’s memories and has invented a fairy tale of a coup d’état for public consumption at home and abroad.

In order to successfully accomplish this mission, the Hugo Chávez administration has resorted to media and resources of all kinds, from making use of its iron control of the branches of government and the abundant petrodollars to taking advantage of a rigged system of justice. It has twisted the facts in a trumped up documentary entitled “The revolution will not be televised,” and, as though that were not enough, it has persecuted and cornered countless people who exercised their legitimate right to protest, one way or another, against a system they opposed, as well as those who, doing their job, defended them against the barbarities committed by supporters of the government.

The sad fact of the matter is that three years after April 11-13 no one knows with any certainty what really happened, largely because the government itself has not allowed objective investigations to be conducted and because it has deliberately manipulated the facts. This is due, in part, to the regime’s desire to hide the fact that a multitude of 600,000 to 800,000 unarmed people who tried to reach Miraflores Palace to demonstrate their opposition to the political project that the government wanted to implement in the country was repelled by force.

The truth is that, in these past three years, the historical distortion of the facts and the absolute power accumulated by means of legal stratagems have turned a democratically elected government into the strongest dictatorship that Venezuela has known since the times of Juan Vicente Gómez.